12/09/2014

NASA's Curiosity rover has uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on the red planet that could have been a perfect spot for tiny primitive organisms to flourish, researchers reported Monday in the journal Science and presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Now that the $2.5 billion mission has accomplished a main goal — finding a habitable environment in the lake — attention has turned to the search for carbon-based organic compounds that are fundamental to all living things, The Associated Press says.

03/27/2014

The orbit of the planet — the most distant known object in our solar system — suggests that there's a giant, unseen rocky world that's 10 times the mass of Earth and is orbiting far beyond Pluto, says New Scientist.

So, given our recent ability to detect more than 1,000 very distant planets, how have we missed this possibility in what's essentially our neighborhood?

The answer is that that NASA's Kepler space telescope, which has had such success in finding distant planets, is designed to detect dips in the brightness of alien stars as planets pass in front of them — so it would have no chance of spotting a planet like this one, New Scientist says.

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